According to a recent Harris poll, only a third of Americans say they are truly happy. That’s too bad, considering that Americans – especially folks in Ohio – don’t really have it too bad, in the grand scheme of things.

But, we were curious – which Ohio cities might be the most happiest? We’re about to find out, using science and data.

After analyzing the largest cities, we gleefully present the happiest places in Ohio:

Beavercreek

Westerville

Springboro

Upper Arlington

Dublin

Mason

Gahanna

Perrysburg

Hilliard

Hudson

Read on below to see how we crunched the numbers and how your town ranked. If you have a smile on your face, you probably live in one of these cities.

There’s also a chart towards the bottom that has the detailed stats on the top 20 happiest Ohio cities.

Oh, and by the way, East Cleveland is the most miserable city in Ohio. Sadly, Cleveland is 2nd.

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How do you decide if a city in Ohio is happy or not?

In order to rank the happiest places in Ohio, we had to determine what criteria makes people happy. It isn’t a stretch to assume that happy people earn great salaries, are relatively stress free, have a stable home life and live where the weather is nice.

So we scraped the internet for those criteria, and it spit out the answer. Like magic.

How we crunched the numbers

We threw a lot of criteria at this one in order to get the best, most complete results possible. Using FBI crime data, the government census, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Sperling’s Best Places, and Twitter, this is the criteria we used, looking at the state’s 50 largest cities:

Percentage of residents with a college degree

Average commute times

Employment rates

Cost of living

Crime

Sunny days

% of married couples

% of home owners

For geo-located Tweets, we used #happy.

There’s a chart below the quick summary of the top 20 happiest cities in Ohio.

1. Beavercreek

It was close, but Beavercreek, a Dayton suburb, is apparently the happiest place in the state of Ohio. Let’s see why.

First off, it would be hard to find a smarter and happily employed number of people than those in Beavercreek. Only 4% of the people here are without jobs, and 76% have college degrees. We’re arguing that job security goes a long way towards happiness.

So does feeling safe. Crime is in the bottom 15% here (22nd lowest overall).

72% of the people in Beavercreek own their own homes, and 6 in 10 are happily married.

It doesn’t get much better than that, overall. The only knock? The cost of living here is really high. But they can afford it – families average about $75,000 a year in annual incomes.

Beavercreek has been on many ‘top’ lists before, including Money Magazine’s ‘Top 100 Places To Live in America.’

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Other Highlights

Springboro: This affluent suburb smack dab between Cincinnati and Dayton has the highest population of married people in the state, at 69%. Springboro also ranks 5th in annual incomes, and 11th in the most sunny days in the state, each year. You get sunshine on your shoulders for 179 days a year here.

That’s a lot for Ohio.

Upper Arlington: This Columbus suburb has it made in so many ways. How can you not be happy when you earn huge sums of money? Families border on $100,000 a year each year, and hardly everyone has a job and a college degree.

It’s also the 2nd most expensive place to live in the state. We’re sure lots of people will argue that they’re perfectly fine with their small city lifestyle.

Cleveland is pretty miserable: Many of the 400,000 residents of Cleveland are most likely pretty sad. They rank dead last in employment (8.4% are out of work), and it’s the 3rd most dangerous place in Ohio. Plus, you see sunshine less than half the year.

The other C’s: Cincinnati ranks as the 15th most miserable and Columbus is about right in the middle. Dayton is even sadder than Cincinnati, according to the data.

There You Have It

Like we said earlier, trying to determine the happiest cities in Ohio is usually a subjective matter. But if you’re analyzing cities where people are not stable, where it’s dangerous and the weather is bad, this is an accurate list.

If you’re curious enough, here are the most miserable cities in OH, according to science: East Cleveland, Cleveland, Youngstown, Warren, Euclid.

2 thoughts on “These Are The 10 Happiest Cities In Ohio”

“Wow!! This is really cool! As the outgoing Mayor of Beavercreek (just 9 days left!), I was thrilled to see Beavercreek heading up this “Happiest Cities” list. With our population now approaching 46,000, and our unemployment rate down to 3.5%, we have a great quality of life in a number of other areas as well. (We’re also listed as one of the safest cities in Ohio; and our schools are top-notch.) We may be on to something – Living here, you won’t have to part with too much of your hard-earned wages to pay for housing, and the driving time to work is among the shortest in the state. Beavercreek residents collect a substantial paycheck and finding a safe neighborhood to put down roots isn’t a problem. All things considered, this is a great place to live.”